Monthly Archives: May 2011

The theme for Project of the Month during June 2011 is education. We’ll map the places that we associate with educating ourselves and others. Is the primary school that you attended included in OpenStreetMap? Your high school? Add those places to the map. We’ll look at post-secondary schools and other places associated with education as the month progresses.

During the course of the month, we’ll be adding local primary and secondary schools. You’ll find guidelines on how to map schools on the wiki.

The email for users, who didn‘t accept the new Contributor Terms so far, is ready now. It should be translated in as many languages as possible. A first batch of emails has already been send out now.

Blog post by Patrick Weber about “Where’s the Search” field on the OpenStreetMap.org main page. Maybe as a result of this post, the search field has now been moved to an upper left position on the main OSM page.

Let’s look at some solutions. One is to get rid of them. We spend too much time worrying about this crap, just kill talk@ and move to a new list discuss@ or something. Let that list have a clear and simple etiquette policy list. Put someone in charge of kick/banning people who don’t play nice. The problem here is there are very few people willing to take responsibility for being the moderator. It’s unpaid, nobody will be nice to you (except me, obviously) and it’s hard work.

Below: Mailing list infestation marines prepare to nuke the talk@ list from orbit, because it’s the only way to be sure.

Another is that we let the talk@ list be. All the clueful people decamp to a new list with a nice policy as above. Stop linking to talk@ and leave the bozos there. Hopefully they don’t notice.

Below: a newbie after making a polite suggestion on legal-talk@

We could all migrate (one imagines this follows a sea parting) to the forums. There we could be safe for awhile. Newbies are more at ease in forums. It’s easier to delete posts, they don’t have the same permanence that a mailing list does: Forever in the archive, and already sent to all participants.

None of these options are easy and we can just vote with our feet.

There is an interesting technical solution possible though. Take the forum mechanics to a mailing list. So instead of every post going to every participant just send it to participants with high karma. If they like the post (either explicitly by clicking/emailing something, or implicitly by not doing anything) then it goes to others on the list. That list can have override features so I can get sent everything in a thread or block certain people. I’ve actually started building something like this but it’s too big to fit in the margin.

Below: calm arrives at talk@ during a license discussion, unicorns descend from the skies and free healthcare for all

Before utopia arrives, Steve’s top tips for the mailing lists are as follows

Stop asking permission on the lists, you will never get it

Don’t feed the trolls

Clueful people post more, and more cluefully to drown out said trolls

Someone should be appointed to moderate the lists and just warn, kick and then ban people who aren’t nice. Just use common sense to identify who they are

OSM.org was updated with a refined changeset view. “When you view the history tab, you’ll now see a map with bounding boxes shown for recent changesets in the area. Hovering over the changeset will highlight the bounding box, and vice-versa.”

The OpenStreetMap Foundation has published guidelines for tile layers to be considered for inclusion on the OpenStreetMap web page.

Henk Hoff has created a draft agreement for OSMF local chapters on the wiki and asked for input.

Emilie Laffray is stepping down from the OSMF board for personal and work reasons. The board appointed Oliver Kühn to the position of treasurer previously held by Emilie. The board will continue with six members until the next board election.

Derick Rethans wrote a blog post about common misunderstandings regarding OpenStreetMap.

Pascal Neis added a few new features to “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap ?”. You can now see how a user contributed the last 12 months. Further he created new stats for the OSM Inspector Routing View. You can find the complete analysis here.

“The Open Static Map Service [from MapQuest] enables the user to create beautiful static map images generated via an HTTP request for their website or publication.”

QualityStreetMap 2 is a web tool to document the progress made on mapping with aerial imagery or importing data for a given tile.

CloudMade released a new open source javascript library for interactive maps called Leaflet. It can be seen as an alternative to OpenLayers.

It is no accident that OpenStreetMap was founded in London, and that the London OpenStreetMap community is so strong, so engaged and so important to the everyday functioning and long term success of OpenStreetMap. They meet often, they map often and they are passionate about OpenStreetMap.

These are the faces behind many of the emails that you see on the OSM lists, behind the code submissions that improve OSM and behind the server racks adding another hard drive. Show us your local OSM group. Add more faces to the OSM emails we read.

This is a Featured image, which means that it has been identified as one of the best examples of OpenStreetMap mapping, or that it provides a useful illustration of the OpenStreetMap project.

If you know another image of similar quality, you can nominate it on Featured image proposals.

The logo was created by Ken Vermette, who was kind enough to answer a few questions about his design.

“I made the logo a few months ago when I first found out about OpenStreetMap, I’ve always been a supporter of open projects; I can’t afford to donate, and outside of PHP I can’t really program, so I do odd graphics instead when I have extra time. I don’t think it was 2 hours after discovering OSM that I had started sketching designs. Ultimately, I just really liked the original logo so I didn’t change the design and aimed to try remastering it.

I was actually quite surprised about it being used [as the new logo] – I had posted my work to the OSM lists, and I thought it had been declined or forgotten. While sitting on the logo the question came in asking if it was creative-commons licensed, which it was, and next thing I knew it was on the website!

I need to admit I’m quite humbled, so much work has been put into OpenStreetMap it staggers you once you realize the scope of the project. People ride their bikes, plot trees, point out parks and define roads to make this work. It always pains me when someone looks at an open source project and rules it out because it’s “unattractive”, especially when it’s such a great project. I want to keep refining the logo to be on par with the effort put into OSM, so people could see it for the incredible resource that it is; I could never do it though, I’d be working forever!

Anyway, I’m just glad that I could help out – I’d really like to thank every OSM mapper and contributor out there, drawing an icon seems dwarfed compared to the effort of mapping the world.”

Ken, we thank you for your contribution to OpenStreetMap. We all know it isn’t just any logo. 🙂

May 2011 is sport and activity month. The Project of the Month is to map sport pitches in your area. Other sport and activity related objects will be Project of the Week for the remainder of May.

A sports centre caters to several or many individual sports by providing the infrastructure for participants in those sports. A racquet sports centre might include playing courts for tennis, squash and racquetball among others. A general sports centre might include a multi-purpose gymnasium, outdoor fields for soccer, rugby, football and baseball and indoor and outdoor courts for volleyball.